1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to generally an optical writing device, an image forming apparatus, and an optical writing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there has been known an optical writing device that performs optical writing by causing beams emitted from a plurality of light sources, which can be independently driven, to fall on the surface of a photoreceptor depending on an image signal. In such a device that performs optical writing using multiple beams in this way, the beams may differ in write width, and this leads to a problem of positional deviation of the beams. As a method for resolving such positional deviation of beams, for example, Japanese Patent No. 3850593 discloses a method for making a plurality of light sources differ from one another in modulation frequency.
However, in the method disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 3850593, it is necessary to provide a means for changing the modulation frequency to each of the light sources, and this causes a problem of an increase in the circuit size when the number of beams is large.
The present invention has been made in consideration of the above, and an object of the present invention is to provide an optical writing device, an image forming apparatus, and an optical writing method capable of adjusting write widths of multiple beams without causing an increase in the circuit size due to an increase in the number of light sources.